Category: Social Media

“I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Bond”

Today is Daniel Craig’s birthday, and it’s not my intent to dump on the guy.  So, go out and have a great day, Danny, get some presents, and eat some cake.  Anything said here isn’t personal.  It’s in a wider context which you cannot possibly understand.  If you did, you’d go to the film franchise that is James Bond, turn in your tuxedo, your double O ranking, your License to Kill and resign.  In fact, you should have done it already, but alas…  Daniel, you are forgiven ‘cause you don’t know what you’re doin’.

James Bond is part of the Western culture that stretches back beyond Beowolf to the heroes of Greek mythology.  He has a place with Hercules.  He ranks with King Arthur’s knights, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan.  He is so intimately connected to what we are as a society that when you mention his name, nobody says, “Who?”  There are presidents, popes and kings who don’t command that kind of respect.  So why has 007 been turned into a pouty tough guy with a tentative jaw line?  Don’t answer that!  It’s a rhetorical question.  The damage has already been done.

I’m not blaming Daniel Craig particularly.  There are producers, directors and writers who not only share the blame but are hugely responsible for it.  Craig is an actor.  He does what he’s told.  Of course, he could put a little more oomph into it, but these days actors are judged by their abs, not their oomph.  The real problem is it looks like everybody connected to the James Bond film franchise studied Bond at the Learning Annex.  It obvious they have never seen the other films and they have definitely never read the books.  If they had they wouldn’t be so cavalier with their portrayal.  They would treat James Bond with respect and quit making him look like Derek Zoolander with a pistol.

The current James Bond is based on one fundamental fallacy — he’s an antihero.  That assumption is so dead wrong if I were Ian Fleming, living or dead, I’d sue this current crowd of Bond makers for defamation of my character.  James Bond is not an antihero.  He’s not even an unlikely hero.  He’s a hero.  He’s quicker, smarter and mentally stronger than the average guy.  He has charm and charisma.  He does the right things for the right reasons.  He’s dedicated.  That’s why he has a Licence to Kill.  The licence is issued by the British government (for reference, see Sir Francis Drake’s Letters of Marque) under the proposition that when faced with a villain who is willing to blow up places like Miami (Emilio Largo in Thunderball) you don’t organize a discussion group — you shoot him.  (Where have we seen that scenario recently?)  And it is a Licence to Kill, not a licence to spray bullets around like some demented Rambo.

Playing Bond like an emotionally bankrupt thug is to diminish the purpose of Bond.  At root, James Bond is a civil servant.   He is a government worker, trained to do his job — just like a tax collector or a traffic warden.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  He is not a semi-loose cannon or a killing machine.  He gets up in the morning and goes to work, just like everybody else.  He has a desk and a secretary.  He doesn’t even have his own office.  He has to share with 008 and 011.  He has a demanding boss, and sometimes he gets bored.  Plus — and this is another rudimentary fact the current Bond people are missing — James Bond is a secret agent of the government.  Bond’s work, by its very nature, must be discreet.  This current guy leaves enough mayhem behind him to attract Lindsay Lohan’s three ring media circus.  If he had any higher a profile he’d be hosting Dancing with the Stars.

In the two Craig/Bond movies to date, James Bond is neither recognizable nor worthy of the name.  The last travesty, Quantum of Solace, isn’t even a real movie.  It’s a series of Mack Sennett chase scenes punctuated by random acts of destruction and numerous hard glances of tight-jawed “Blue Steel.”  Casino Royale at least had a story.

Speaking of which, there is a single scene in Casino Royale that sums up just how little the current Bond franchise knows about its raison d’etre.  In it, Bond breaks into M’s house.  Like hell!  James Bond would never do that.  It would never cross his mind, for any number of reasons, not the least of which is he has too much class.  Secondly, M would fire him on the spot, think about it over a whiskey, realize Bond had gone crazy and have him shot on his way home.  (Not a bad idea, given there’s another movie in the works.)

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Daniel Craig!  Jason Statham, where are you?

Leap Year: It’s About Time

Okay, ladies and gentlemen!  Brace yourselves — because there’s no way to sugar-coat it.  Today doesn’t exist; you are standing in a man made time warp.  What you think of as now has already passed, and the future won’t begin again until after midnight.  Deep, huh?  Don’t be scared, though; it happens every four years.  (Not really but it’s too complicated to explain*.)  It’s called a Leap Year, or Leap Day to be more precise, and we need it because the universe doesn’t care what time you want to go to work.

The Universe, Mother Nature’s boss, doesn’t get involved in the affairs of humans.  It’s got better things to do.  We humans, Mother Nature’s most precocious children, have never quite understood that.  We think that if we make a couple more scientific discoveries or sit naked on a mountainside for a couple of years, we’ll get this whole universe thing figured out.  It’s not likely, but nobody ever accused our species of being humble.  The Universe actually rolls on without us, asking neither permission nor forgiveness, and nothing we say or do is going to change that.  So every once in a while, without actually admitting it, we have to adapt or… well … nothing really, because, as I’ve said, the Universe doesn’t care.

Despite what old hippies and serious dope smokers will tell you, Time is not an artificial concept.  It exists, and people have always measured it.  Way back in the caveman days, there were only two times — dark and light.  This is an extremely accurate measurement which most species on this planet still use.  However, as our species got busier and busier, they discovered that minor Time (major time was beyond their grasp) had recurring themes.  The sun travelled across the sky, the moon got larger and smaller, and familiar clusters of stars moved in elliptical patterns.  All these things happened with incredible regularity.  Therefore, it was simple for primitive humans to figure out that there were usually twenty nine suns between each full moon.  Not only that, but our ancestors also found that if they persistently watched the night sky, the movement of the stars corresponded to the seasons.  For example, what we call Orion’s Belt first appears in the southwestern sky in early January, soon after the morning sun is lowest on the horizon.  Thus, by noting when Orion’s Belt first appeared in the sky and counting the number of suns until it reappeared, early skywatchers discovered a complete earthly cycle or a year.  These two rough and ready measurements (or something similar) are the basis of all early calendars.

Unfortunately, as our society got more and more sophisticated, these primitive tools didn’t keep pace.  There is an inconsistency between the months and the years that causes nothing but problems.  Essentially, 12 lunar months equal only 348 solar days — which leaves a 17 day gap in the celestial year.  As the years went on, the seasons were slowly getting out of whack.  No less a light than Julius Caesar saw this and devised a new system called The Julian Calendar that remedied most of the problems – for a while.  However, 1600 years later these problems were back — with some extra added attractions.  Not only were the seasons out of place again (they had moved twelve calendar days in the centuries since Caesar) but the highest holiday in the Christian calendar, Easter, whose timing is based on the Spring Equinox, was disappearing into seasonal winter.  Pope Gregory XIII decided rather than let the Universe figure it out, he would fix it.  After all, he was the infallible head of the Roman Catholic Church.  He set his minions a mission: devise a calendar that would work for all time and keep Easter in the spring (where it belonged.)  They came up with the Gregorian Calendar which added an extra day in February every four years (or so) to even out the imbalance.  Gregory’s new calendar was proclaimed in a papal bull on February 24th, 1582 and is now in general use.  Problem solved.

Which brings us back to the time warp that is today.  Today doesn’t exist because Gregory’s extra day was inserted for time already past.  Here’s the deal.  As our earth moves through the Universe, it takes 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds to go from point A all the way around to point A again.  For simple calculations, we call that a year.  That was the amount of time a year took in 2009, 2010 and 2011.  Obviously, that time is gone.  However, in our burning need to realign the Universe, here we are with a whole extra day to make up for it.  Actually, if you want to be picky, the first 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds of today did exist, but the other 17 hours, 27 minutes and 36 seconds don’t.  They’re all in our past.  We’ve already lived those hours, minutes and seconds.  In the great metaphysical scheme of things, this is borrowed time.

So take the rest of the day off, kick back, throw a ball, read to your kids or just lie elbows deep in a pillow, contemplating the infinite.  If anybody asks, blame it on Pope Gregory.  He’s the guy who thought a little time management would be good for the Universe.

 

*A Leap Year is every year that is exactly divisible by four, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100; the centurial years that are exactly divisible by 400 are still leap years. For example, the year 1900 is not a leap year; the year 2000 is a leap year.

It’s Them and Us – Whether You Like It or Not!

One of the main reasons people have so many problems these days is no matter how contemporary we try to be, we have never given up our tribal, them-and-us, way of thinking.  It isn’t a revelation that people think in pairs; we’re built that way.  We have two hands, two feet, two eyes etc. etc., so it’s only natural that we organize our world along the same lines.  It’s that eternal balance in nature that the Greek philosophers discovered (while their slaves were doing all the work) and scruffy-bearded bores have been droning on about ever since.  What started out as primitive left and right simply translated itself into everything else — hot and cold, wet and dry, etc. etc.  From there, it wasn’t a major leap to less tangible things like smart and stupid or right and wrong.  We might intellectually recognize all kinds of nuances in things like wet and dry (damp, for example) but when it comes down to straight analysis, inside our heads, there are no shades of grey.  The best we can do is black, blacker and white, whiter.  Of course, we mouth all kinds of platitudes about inclusivity and nonlinear thinking, but that’s merely for public consumption.  Unless your name is Leonardo da Vinci, you paint the world with only two brushes.

Here’s how it works.  When we think, we can only hold two complete ideas in our head at the same time.  It’s the natural pairing of things, – Bert and Ernie, Hansel and Gretel, Bogie and Bacall.  Once we step outside this comfort zone, we get confused.  It’s something I like to call “The Other Guy Phenomenon.”  When we are faced with more than two items, the third one gets a little hazy in our minds.  For example, Apollo 11 was America’s first manned space mission to land on the moon.  This was one of the major events in all human history.  Everybody knows there were three men involved; Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and … wait a minute… who was that other guy?  (FYI it was Michael Collins, but see what I mean.)  Likewise, remember The Three Tenors?  Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and – uh — the other guy.  (He was Jose Carreras, by the way.)  How about the Bronte Sisters?  There are Charlotte, who wrote Jane Eyre; Emily, who wrote Wuthering Heights and … and…  Her name was Anne and she wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel that not even sophomores study anymore.  Or there are always The Three Musketeers?  Unless you’re a total Alexandre Dumas fan, you remember them the way everybody else does: Athos, Porthos and D’Artagnan.  But, that’s not right; D’Artagnan wasn’t a Musketeer.  The third Musketeer was actually Aramis.  What happens is our minds hold the natural pair together and kinda hope for the best on whatever’s tagging along.  In the case of the Musketeers, we even make a substitution when we can’t quite remember!  Yes, I know there are The Three Stooges; Snap, Crackle and Pop; and bacon, lettuce and tomato.  But if you think about it, we treat these trios as if they were one item.  A BLT is a sandwich; Snap, Crackle and Pop are Rice Krispies; and The Three Stooges weren’t funny the first time.

My point is that we think in terms of pairs, whether they be strikingly similar or diametrically opposed.  It’s cultural memory from the dark tips of time.  In the beginning, there was us, the cave people we knew, and there was them, the ones we didn’t.  We were the good guys because we were us, and they were the bad guys because it pays to be careful with strangers.  For several millennia, there was no third choice, so we never adapted to one.  Now, in the 21st century, when we need to make a judgement call, we revert to that natural pairing because anything else is just some cloudy, vague option.  Of course, nobody admits to it because, after all, it is Neanderthal thinking.  However, like it or not, we live in a world of peanut butter and jelly, Starsky and Hutch and who was the third Bee Gee, anyway?